Content is The “Lion Factor” in Succeeding with ABM and Person-Based Marketing

The lion is as good as it hunts. The beauty and the strength wane as the hunt goes down. I often relate to that impressive ‘Lion’ factor in content marketing too! Do you? How do you measure the performance of your content, and how often? To find answers, you have to be a lion in your B2B marketing strategy yourself. Isn’t it!!!

Do Enterprise Decision Makers Actually Consume B2B Content?

Powerful content can accelerate not just your marketing efforts, but also add more teeth to your sales. With the coming of age for ABM campaigns, traditional content strategies can no longer serve as the engine room for B2B marketing and sales. Text, videos, social media comments, live streaming vlogs, webinars, and podcasts are the new arsenals for building an effective ABM-focused content calendar. In a recent report, Influ2 revealed the extent to which your target accounts are impressed with your content. Further drilling down, the report reveals great content, if not read, are just as good as black dots. So, how does all that work in the ABM-centric world?

In an explosive chat with Influ2 CEO and Co-founder, Dmitri Lisitski, shares the contrasting aspects of working with B2B content that sells well.

Person-Based Marketing Is the New Marketing Tactic You Can’t Ignore

Should businesses focus on person-based marketing?

Dmitri said, “Almost every B2B market is extremely competitive. That’s why businesses are always searching for new ways to build relationships with their prospective customers. Even if you come up with a new great marketing tactic that enables you to stand out from the crowd of your competitors, you can never relax.”

Dmitri added, “Your competitors will quickly catch up, and you will ultimately lose the competitive edge.”

For example, we all remember the time when just holding a webinar was enough to draw the attention of amazing prospects. But now, everybody receives a webinar invite almost every day, and it’s very difficult to impress anybody with a spectacular webinar.

via Influ2 Report

How Person-Based Marketing Fits Into B2B Content Plans?

Dmitri provides deep insights into how ABM and content marketing are keys to building any goal-driven business plan.

He said, “Person-based marketing is the new marketing tactic that can give you a competitive edge if you employ it today. You start with personal advertising to build relationships with the “always-busy” decision makers who never respond to your emails, ignore your LinkedIn requests and don’t take phone calls. And, because you can track engagement at the person-by-person level, you can continue your dialogue with those who are interested.”

“Essentially, it’s a combination of outbound marketing in the sense that you can knock the door of your prospect without waiting for them to come, and inbound marketing in the sense that you typically employ content marketing, which is much less intrusive than traditional outbound techniques,” added Influ2 CEO.

Person-Based Marketing Versus Account-Based Marketing

How do these technologies differ from each other?

Clearly, Person-Based Marketing is the evolution of Account-Based Marketing. According to the Influ2 CEO, ABM disrupted Martech with the idea of “market of one account.” PBM adds: “and, by the way, there are a dozen decision makers inside that account who you care about.”

“Every engagement is priceless, but you need to identify your visitor to be able to follow up. A lead form is probably the most frequently used solution, but it is a really BAD one based on simple math.” – Latest Influ2 Report

Dmitri said, “At the technology level, this simple addition requires a totally different technology stack in order to be able to execute on it. It’s easy to target and track accounts, but if you want to target and track specific decision makers, you must employ machine learning, which is not directly available from existing advertising platforms.”

Key Factors That Prevent Tech Buyers from Referring to Content

How could Influencer Marketing technologies help increase content consumption?

Dmitri said, “B2B marketers invest a lot to create great content. But, this effort remains largely unnoticed, especially if you think about enterprise decision makers. They just don’t have time to follow your blog – no matter how great it is. Yet, they follow some influencers and read some media, so both influencer marketing and media relations can help to get in front of decision makers. Person-based marketing adds to your content marketing by enabling you to put your content in front of decision makers via personalized content ads skipping the intermediaries.”

The Role of Sales Coaching and Sales Enablement In Increasing Consumption of Content for B2B Buying Journeys

By leveraging people-based marketing, sales teams are able to better target and approach the people who are consuming content that would drive sales.

Dmitri agrees. He said, “I think for this question, it’s not “what sales coaching/sales enablement increases b2b content consumption,” it’s more so, by better understanding who will be consuming B2B content, sales teams will be able to do their job better.”

How does the report benefit B2B marketing and customer success teams?

The main takeaway – decision makers do read your content. According to our research, 25 percent of decision makers spent more than 40 seconds on the landing page of selected PBM campaigns. These are the real engagements, and you definitely want to convert these engagements into conversations.

Avoiding “Lead Forms” and Picking an Alternative

We call Lead Forms heartless killers. In traditional digital marketing you need a lead form to convert web traffic into humans, and in other words, to identify your visitors. However, most lead forms only give you 2 to 5 percent conversion rate, which means 95 to 98 percent of visitors remain unidentified.

The vast majority of your prospects are lost at the first stage of your marketing funnel. Unfortunately, ABM technologies don’t solve this problem. In the case of person-based marketing, every click is identified, so you can get rid of Lead Forms. Engagement tracking serves the purpose of a lead form. You can follow up with everybody who engaged. So, if 55 percent of your visitors were interested in your content, you can follow up with each of them.

AI/ML And the Scope of Automation in Completely Revolutionizing People-Based Marketing

The internet has become ubiquitous and, as a result, our digital footprints have bloated dramatically. AI/ML technologies flourish on large datasets, so it is just a matter of time before AI/ML technologies will be applied to analyze our digital footprints. We should expect more AI/ML-based marketing technologies to arrive, enabling marketers to be more precise, more efficient and ultimately get better results. It’s also good for society, as marketing becomes much more relevant, less noisy and less annoying than in a data-less offline world.